2024-03-23
Readings
The story of how blue LEDs were made:
A possible CRISPR-based eventual way to remove HIV from cells: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-hiv-cell-culture-crispr-cas.html
The possibility of pursuing connectomics research (subfield of neuroscience) using light microscopy rather than the rather-more-involved electron microscopy: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.01.582884v1
On the hopes that small ejecta from Enceladus might be enough to determine life: https://phys.org/news/2024-03-life-ice-grain-emitted-extraterrestrial.html
Long-term changes in post-seizure brains may be preventable with rapid therapy: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-intervention-seizure-term-epilepsy.html
Methods for targeted forgetting of some trained content in machine learning: https://techxplore.com/news/2024-03-machine-unlearning-generative-ai-copyright.html
The physics of the cicada urination process: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/20/1239529315/cicadas-pee-urination-jets-new-research-microfluidics-3d-printing-experiments
Thoughts
I’ve been considering a category of things morally related to pardons - situations where the legal system is generally just but there is so acute an injustice unpunished by the legal system that the very rare need to rectify it is met and someone does, outside the law. I accept the possibility of this, that it could in theory be moral, but also I think that in such cases the necessary counterweight against individuals deciding this is the right thing to do arbitrarily and undermining rule of law is that they accept the punishments associated with their law-breaking. The situations where this both would come up and actually be rectifiable (meaning someone is in a position to do something about it) should be extremely rare and the need to accept the punishment is needed to preserve the law as the dominant governor for permissable action. Someone doing this should also restrain themselves to the minimal lawbreaking needed to achieve the needed result, for similar reasons.
Centrality of moralism, legal universalism as a major future issue. AI and human modification. Centralising law makes for higher stakes when the laws don’t land in good places
Current Events
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, with Russia finally suffering some damage within its territory in strikes on power plants. The EU is also redirecting frozen Russian assets to be used to buy Ukraine more weapons, a welcome move while France considers directly sending military forces into the country.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza continues, with a lot of civilian casualties as the IDF does air strikes on Rafah. Smotrich also announced the seizure about 2000 acres of West Bank land for new settlements
With the resignation of Haitian political leadership, a gang war is leading to starvation in the country’s capital; various countries are evacuating their citizens
Ireland’s PM Varadkar resigned (also as party leader for Fine Gael). Vietnam’s President also resigned.
Slovakia’s presidential election is underway
Content
Why NordVPN isn’t generally useful and when it is:
Video on my Mage: Ascension fan-content:
Polls
Gallup on who Americans see as the nation’s greatest enemy ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/612170/americans-china-nation-top-foe-russia-second.aspx ) - Contrary to a lot of the polls I talk about, here my views are not that close to the center. The poll lists China as the US’s greatest enemy; I don’t see China as an enemy so much as a semi-hostile rival. Our relationship with China is something to be managed, and we’ll want to push them to stop their recent border abuses and their belief that Taiwan is theirs. If we have an enemy, it’s clearly Russia, to the extent where I believe we should join Ukraine in its war to push Russia out of Ukraine, and we should have an explicit policy to destabilise the Russian economy and state until they stop trying to destroy other countries. I don’t see Iran as an enemy either, or at least if we are enemies I would like for us not to be (but that’s a long road). Weird and amusing that 5 percent of Americans see the US as its own greatest enemy. Creative thinking, there. I don’t see Israel as an enemy so much as a parasite; we fund them and we should stop, particularly when they have someone like Bibi at the helm and a fascist like Smotrich in the cabinet
Another foreign policy bit from Pew, this one on the validity of Israel and Hamas’s reasons to fight ( https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/ ) - I think the problem is that both Palestinians and Israelis have valid reasons to fight, at least for a certain notion of valid. Israel was attacked, but Israel is also a racist state that had longstanding abuses against Palestinians and its recent lurch to the right declared the country to be about only one of its ethnicities. Both sides are deeply shitty.
Policy Focus
A recent very expensive new gene therapy for a rare disease raises the perennial debate on drug cost; in my view, it’s not worth developing medicines that significantly exceed the lifetime expected earnings of a citizen (in this case, a wholesale price of 4.25 million), and not worth buying them if developed. The only argument that should be entertained along these lines are if a treatment is both for something not terribly rare and if its price may come down very significantly, but that’s not the case for this treatment and illness. Budgets are not unlimited, and as unfortunate it would be to need to tell a parent, it’s the right thing to reject these medical services of funding. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/health/gene-therapy-orchard-mld/index.html
I’ve talked about this before in other forums; I don’t think restaurants should either be able to take tips from their workers nor pay workers less than mimimum wage if they’re tip-eligible. It’s bad policy because it makes their survivability contingent on getting good tips in an unpredictable way. Tips should be extra - things on top of standard fair wages (and I generally support minimum wages for employment). https://azmirror.com/2024/03/20/restaurants-want-to-amend-the-az-constitution-so-they-can-pay-servers-less-than-minimum-wage/
The Wall of Shame
Redis is a piece of database software, and they recently relicensed their software from being Opensource to just being source-available.
Continuing the ugly trend of idealess film studios retreading lost ground, apparently “Slow Horses” is at fault for an upcoming remake of the Neverending Story; we should generally shun studios that undertake things like this.
Rod Blagojevich, corrupt former governor of of Illinois, attempted to get a court to lift provisions of his impeachment so he could return to politics.
Archaeological Prospection (an academic journal) gets a half-in half-out shame in that it badly failed its peer review process for a paper claiming that a mountain was actually a human-made sculpture (part of some cultural nonsense that smells like Hindutva), publishing it, but then thankfully retracted it. Hopefully they’ll fix their processes so such populist nonsense has a less chance of being published next time
Reviewlets
It Takes Two (video game) - Very short review. The game literally takes two people to play. It’s not playable alone. I wish it had had a warning on the online store page.
Sekiro Shadows Die Twice (video game) - I knew it was highly-regarded, but also that it’s likely too hard for me. I’m struggling with the difficulty, but it’s also making me learn some of the hard bits that I I used cleverness to bypass in other Fromsoft games. Having a great time (currently stuck on a horseback boss in the main questline and a jumpy knife-throwing lady in an area I’m probably not supposed to beat yet)
Charlie the Choo-Choo (“childrens” book) - On the surface it’s a children’s book, but there’s a lot that’s sinister sprinkled everywhere; it’s funny and weird. Slightly better if you know Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.
Amusements
It’s very dark humour, but I recently spotted that Sony’s aibo product requires a yearly subscription or your pet pseudo-dog gets lobotomized: https://electronics.sony.com/more/aibo/p/ercsm12
Remi Gaillard is a French prankster; this is one of his classic (and less confrontational) bits:
Skit on the invention of Hold music:
An interesting story about how a record company messed with a friendly collaboration between Stevie Wonder and Jeff Beck (and the song Superstition, which despite the story I’m still glad is a Stevie Wonder song because I think Wonder has a better voice for it): https://www.musicradar.com/news/jeff-beck-stevie-wonder-superstition-cause-weve-ended-as-lovers
Recent Music
Dying Day - Brandi Carlile - Country music that’s really easy to listen to
Sinners Blues - Port Sulphur Band - I think this might be a kind of gospel music? I like it, but it’s not much like things I usually listen to
Artichaut - Chinese Man - Uses a lot of samples (in English; the band is French) and drops them into a lively swing framework.